An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

A revealing account of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster's turbulent and consequential thirteen months in the Trump White House.

At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive President drive necessary shifts in U.S. foreign policy at a critical moment in history. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the hyper partisanship of American politics. With the candor of a soldier and the perspective of a historian, McMaster rises above the fray to lay bare the good, the bad, and the ugly of Trump's presidency and give readers insight into what a second Trump term would look like.

While all administrations are subject to backstabbing and infighting, some of Trump's more unscrupulous political advisors were determined to undermine McMaster and others to advance their narrow agendas. McMaster writes candidly about Cabinet officials who, deeply disturbed by Trump's language and behavior, prioritized controlling the President over collaborating to provide the President with options.

McMaster offers a frank and fresh assessment of the achievements and failures of his tenure as National Security Advisor and the challenging task of maintaining one's bearings and focus on the mission in a hectic and malicious environment.

Determined to transcend the war within the administration and focus on national security priorities, McMaster forged coalitions in Washington and internationally to help Trump advance U.S. interests. Trump's character and personality helped him make tough decisions, but sometimes prevented him from sticking to them. McMaster adroitly assesses the record of Trump's presidency in comparison to the Obama and Biden administrations.

With the 2024 election on the horizon, At War with Ourselves highlights the crucial importance of competence in foreign policy, and makes plain the need for leaders who possess the character and intellect to guide the United States in a tumultuous world.

Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change. We learn how the military evolved from an environmental laggard to a climate and clean energy leader. And we discover how a warming world exacerbates every threat--from hurricanes and forest fires, to competition for increasingly scarce food and water, to terrorism and power plays by Russia and China. The Pentagon now considers climate in war games, disaster relief planning, international diplomacy, and even the design of its own bases. No one knows the stakes better than Sherri Goodman, the Pentagon's first Chief Environmental Officer, also known as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security). In Threat Multiplier, she offers a front row seat to the military's fight for global security, a tale that is as hopeful as it is harrowing.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has openly expressed his intention to annex Taiwan to mainland China, even threatening the use of force. An invasion or blockade of Taiwan by Chinese forces would be catastrophic, with severe consequences for democracies worldwide. In The Boiling Moat, Matt Pottinger and a team of scholars and distinguished military and political leaders urgently outline practical steps for deterrence. The authors stress that preventing a war is more affordable than waging one and emphasize the importance of learning from recent failures in deterrence, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The book argues that a robust military strategy is essential for countering Beijing's aggression. Pottinger and his team map out a workable military strategy for Taiwan, the United States, Japan, Australia, and Europe to pursue collectively, urging quick adoption to avert a devastating war. The significance of Taiwan to the world economy, semiconductor supply, and Indo-Pacific security is underscored.

The authors stress that preventing China's coercive annexation of Taiwan requires democracies to demonstrate not just the means but also the will to effectively resist, conveying the message that a military attempt by Xi would likely lead to disastrous consequences, both for China and for the international community.

No environment is more challenging for militaries than a city. No form of combat is more inherently destructive than urban warfare. And yet too often, militaries are both unprepared for the challenges of cities and unable to avoid being pulled into brutal urban fights. In an increasingly urban world, the future character of conflict will also be increasingly urban. This book sets out to understand that future.

Conflict Realism delves into the intricate web of causation to unveil five pivotal trends shaping the landscape of war and warfare - urban warfare, sieges, attrition, precision strike strategy, and proxy wars - revealing a stark reality: wars remain far more attritional than anticipated by policymakers, military practitioners, and analysts alike.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

A revealing account of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster's turbulent and consequential thirteen months in the Trump White House.

At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive President drive necessary shifts in U.S. foreign policy at a critical moment in history. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the hyper partisanship of American politics. With the candor of a soldier and the perspective of a historian, McMaster rises above the fray to lay bare the good, the bad, and the ugly of Trump's presidency and give readers insight into what a second Trump term would look like.

While all administrations are subject to backstabbing and infighting, some of Trump's more unscrupulous political advisors were determined to undermine McMaster and others to advance their narrow agendas. McMaster writes candidly about Cabinet officials who, deeply disturbed by Trump's language and behavior, prioritized controlling the President over collaborating to provide the President with options.

McMaster offers a frank and fresh assessment of the achievements and failures of his tenure as National Security Advisor and the challenging task of maintaining one's bearings and focus on the mission in a hectic and malicious environment.

Determined to transcend the war within the administration and focus on national security priorities, McMaster forged coalitions in Washington and internationally to help Trump advance U.S. interests. Trump's character and personality helped him make tough decisions, but sometimes prevented him from sticking to them. McMaster adroitly assesses the record of Trump's presidency in comparison to the Obama and Biden administrations.

With the 2024 election on the horizon, At War with Ourselves highlights the crucial importance of competence in foreign policy, and makes plain the need for leaders who possess the character and intellect to guide the United States in a tumultuous world.

The warning signs are obvious. Our freedoms and our nation itself are under siege. We face unprecedented circumstances. Russia and China's expansionist ambitions pose an existential foreign military threat. At the same time, we are facing a significant internal challenge as every fissure from social media to election integrity to our national borders are being exploited.

The backbone of our Republic, ensuring our American freedoms, is our military. The Calvert Task Group sounds the alarm about the erosion of core Navy values of honor, courage, and commitment by progressive politics. Seventeen former military officers, most U.S. Naval Academy graduates, apply their insights shaped by combat, command, and senior leadership experience, to illuminate the divisive threat of woke politics. Politicizing our military endangers security, erodes readiness, and risks wartime defeat.

This book urges readers to stand against the crisis and defend the principles that have made America strong.

The fate of our country is in the hands of the American people. The time to act is now.

This stunning whistleblower account reveals how the Deep State weaponizes federal powers against its political enemies and explores the disastrous reality of the Obama Doctrine, which seeks to create a global balance of power by weakening American preeminence and strengthening America's foreign adversaries.

During his eight-year reign, Barack Obama transformed the U.S. national security, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies as no other president in history has done, advancing a policy of U.S. diminishment that has undermined our global primacy to this day.

In The Insider Threat, Adam Lovinger draws on more than ten years of experience at the Pentagon to explain how the Obama administration orchestrated this coup.

Obama spent his first year in office persuading Americans that the U.S. should step back from its global leadership role to create a new world order based on balance of power politics. But what he never said out loud was that this meant Washington would transfer power to its enemies. When his 2009 worldwide apology tour proved a debacle, Obama changed tack--to subversion by bureaucratic fiat.

He spent the next eight years staging a stealth revolution inside America's most sensitive government agencies, using ideological infighters to replace America's strategic objectives with those of China, Russia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In return, through a range of acts and omissions described in this book, America's adversaries helped Obama and Joe Biden win elections, wealth, and prestige.

Equal parts George Orwell and Franz Kafka, The Insider Threat exposes--for the first time--the secret playbook that Lovinger discovered on his U.S. Department of Defense computer. This file reveals how corrupt senior officials enrich their patrons at taxpayer expense, advance the interests of America's enemies, undermine core U.S. national interests from within, and make administrative reform impossible.

Even longtime Washington insiders will be shocked at the extent of lawlessness that now passes for normal in America's administrative state.

From a former senior advisor to Senator John McCain comes an urgent wake-up call about how new technologies are threatening America's military might.

For generations of Americans, our country has been the world's dominant military power. How the US military fights, and the systems and weapons that it fights with, have been uncontested. That old reality, however, is rapidly deteriorating. America's traditional sources of power are eroding amid the emergence of new technologies and the growing military threat posed by rivals such as China. America is at grave risk of losing a future war.

As Christian Brose reveals in this urgent wake-up call, the future will be defined by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and other emerging technologies that are revolutionizing global industries and are now poised to overturn the model of American defense. This fascinating, if disturbing, book confronts the existential risks on the horizon, charting a way for America's military to adapt and succeed with new thinking as well as new technology. America must build a battle network of systems that enables people to rapidly understand threats, make decisions, and take military actions, the process known as the kill chain. Examining threats from China, Russia, and elsewhere, The Kill Chain offers hope and, ultimately, insights on how America can apply advanced technologies to prevent war, deter aggression, and maintain peace

This is a brilliant and hardheaded book. It will frighten those who prefer not to dwell on the unthinkable and infuriate those who have taken refuge in stereotypes and moral attitudinizing.--Gordon A. Craig, New York Times Book Review

A grim but carefully reasoned and coldly analytical book. . . . One of the most frightening previews which this reviewer has ever seen of the roads that lie just ahead in warfare.--Los Angeles Times

Originally published in 1966, this landmark book explores the ways in which military capabilities--real or imagined--are used, skillfully or clumsily, as bargaining power. Anne-Marie Slaughter's new introduction to the work shows how Schelling's framework--conceived of in a time of superpowers and mutually assured destruction--still applies to our multipolar world, where wars are fought as much online as on the ground.

The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series

From a former senior advisor to Senator John McCain comes an urgent wake-up call about how new technologies are threatening America's military might.

For generations of Americans, our country has been the world's dominant military power. How the US military fights, and the systems and weapons that it fights with, have been uncontested. That old reality, however, is rapidly deteriorating. America's traditional sources of power are eroding amid the emergence of new technologies and the growing military threat posed by rivals such as China. America is at grave risk of losing a future war.

As Christian Brose reveals in this urgent wake-up call, the future will be defined by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and other emerging technologies that are revolutionizing global industries and are now poised to overturn the model of American defense. This fascinating, if disturbing, book confronts the existential risks on the horizon, charting a way for America's military to adapt and succeed with new thinking as well as new technology. America must build a battle network of systems that enables people to rapidly understand threats, make decisions, and take military actions, the process known as the kill chain. Examining threats from China, Russia, and elsewhere, The Kill Chain offers hope and, ultimately, insights on how America can apply advanced technologies to prevent war, deter aggression, and maintain peace

Its capabilities unrivaled and its global reach unmatched, America's military is the envy of the world. Yet, to those in the know, like retired Marine Major General Arnold Punaro, a former Staff Director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, there is compelling need for improvement in its support elements. From the glacial pace of acquisitions to the spiraling growth of the defense agencies to the fully-burdened costs of the All-Volunteer Force, the Department of Defense's non-warfighting elements are not getting enough bang for the buck. Every recent Secretary of Defense has pushed business-minded reforms as a high priority, citing the need to convert overhead to warfighting capacity.

Despite substantial increases in defense spending over the last decades, the number of warfighters is still declining. The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force lays out, in clear and compelling detail, the major factors that contribute to this adverse trend that has outlasted efforts to reverse it by strong Defense Secretaries and even Presidents.

Drawing on his half-century of experience in national security, Gen. Punaro offers a no-nonsense look at the inefficiencies that have plagued the Pentagon's creeping bureaucracy for decades. With calls for defense reform emanating from both the executive and legislative branches, this timely book provides a road map for thoughtful and balanced improvements.

Exploring how the U.S. military can move beyond Iraq and Afghanistan

Despite its lengthy war fighting experience and high-technology weapons, the military is woefully unprepared for future wars because of a conflicted legacy of long involvement in war without end and uncertainty about the future security environment. But the United States cannot simply hit the reset button. If the U.S. military seeks to win in the future, it must acknowledge and reconcile with the inheritance of its long and failed wars. This book seeks to help them do so.

The warning signs are obvious. Our freedoms and our nation itself are under siege. We face unprecedented circumstances. Russia and China's expansionist ambitions pose an existential foreign military threat. At the same time, we are facing a significant internal challenge as every fissure from social media to election integrity to our national borders are being exploited.

The backbone of our Republic, ensuring our American freedoms, is our military. The Calvert Task Group sounds the alarm about the erosion of core Navy values of honor, courage, and commitment by progressive politics. Seventeen former military officers, most U.S. Naval Academy graduates, apply their insights shaped by combat, command, and senior leadership experience, to illuminate the divisive threat of woke politics. Politicizing our military endangers security, erodes readiness, and risks wartime defeat.

This book urges readers to stand against the crisis and defend the principles that have made America strong.

The fate of our country is in the hands of the American people. The time to act is now.

The United States is undergoing a profound and radical transformation, all features of which point to the fact of its departure at an accelerated rate from its largely self-proclaimed status as a global hegemon. The United States has lost ground in every single category that defines the power and status of a nation in relation to its rivals.
This book delves into the reasons for a catastrophic decline of the American nation, addressing a range of factors from the economic (especially energy), to cultural, technological and military factors. America's deindustrialized economy is now deeply affected by what can only be described as a massacre of her small and middle-size businesses and the implosion of the US commercial aerospace industry. America's only driver of real growth, the shale oil industry, is facing realities which may make the Great Depression pale in comparison.
Disintegration also seeks answers to the precipitous moral and professional decline of the always mediocre qualities of the American elites, from the corridors of political power to those of the military and business, now spiraling out of control.
More alarmingly, the trend also points to the possibility of the actual physical disintegration of the United States as a unified entity--whether the divisions are ethnic or ideological.
The most profound fault line is cultural--between the Coastal self-proclaimed elites backed by the secular, liberal media and deep state, who promote the most radical ideologies as it concerns gender and race, and the working class majority whom the former polemicize as deplorables, Christian fundamentalists, white supremacists, and climate and science denialists.
Investigating these factors sheds light on America's future which holds very little promise for the country which had once proclaimed itself to be a shining city on the hill. The American collapse is not just coming, we are presently experiencing it.
How can we deal with a catastrophe which is unfolding before our very eyes?
Disintegration lays out some possibilities.

An ambitious look at how the twentieth century's great powers devised their military strategies and what their implications mean for military competition between the United States and China

How will the United States and China evolve militarily in the years ahead? Many experts believe the answer to this question is largely unknowable. But Zack Cooper argues that the American and Chinese militaries are following a well-trodden path. For centuries, the world's most powerful militaries have adhered to a remarkably consistent pattern of behavior, determined largely by their leaders' perceptions of relative power shifts. By uncovering these trends, this book places the evolving military competition between the United States and China in historical context.

Drawing on a decade of research and on his experience at the White House and the Pentagon, Cooper outlines a novel explanation for how militaries change as they rise and decline. Tides of Fortune examines the paths of six great powers of the twentieth century, tracking how national leaders adjusted their defense objectives, strategies, and investments in response to perceived shifts in relative power. All these militaries followed a common pattern, and their experiences shed new light on both China's recent military modernization and America's potential responses.

While exceptionalism is not unique to America, the intensity of this conviction and its global ramifications are. This has led the US to grossly misinterpret--sometimes deliberately--the causative factors of key events of the past two centuries, reaching the wrong conclusions and learning very wrong lessons.

Nowhere has this been more manifest than in American military thought and its actual application of military power. Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn't won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy.


The technological dimension of American strategy has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict. With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way--intellectually, economically, militarily or culturally--to face a reality which has been hidden for the last 70+ years behind a strategically-crafted delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by the powerful neocon lobby, which still today dominates US policy makers' minds.

In Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov:

- explores the dramatic difference between the Russian and US approach to warfare across the whole spectrum of activities from art and the economy, to the respective national cultures;

- addresses Russia's new and elevated capacities in the areas of traditional warfare as well as recent developments in cyberwarfare and space, and Putin's latest revelations;


- studies in depth several ways in which the US can simply stumble into conflict with Russia and what must be done to avoid it.

Martyanov's former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power--assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street economic indices but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.

Military professionals need to have a clear and working knowledge of the ethical decision-making process. In the search for such clarity, this volume identifies 14 key virtues of the military professional and through introductory essays and real world examples, it provides guidance for service personnel at every stage of their career.

How do think tanks influence Western policies toward Russia? The influence of think tanks in Washington has grown immensely over the past decades in terms of producing research papers, engaging with the media, and having their staff enter government.

The ideal purpose and appeal of think tanks is their ability to function as a bridge between academics, the media, the public, and decision-makers. Political decision-makers are expected to be experts across a wide area of governance which becomes increasingly difficult as the world becomes more complex. Acquiring advice and enhancing competencies through cooperation with scholars at universities can be challenging as academics tend to focus on narrow research questions that take place within a wider discussion of theory and method. Think tanks respond to this challenge as institutions that provide focused research studies and policy papers to address specific and current challenges.

The negative aspect of think tanks is the power they wield, from controlling information to functioning as a waiting room for politicians out of office. Information is power, and a think tanks business model has been established that sells political influence in Washington and manufactures consent among the public. The military-industrial complex is the dominant donor to think tanks, which results in a bias toward military solutions and perpetuating conflict.

Russia remains a leading adversary of the West and has sustained Washington's exorbitant military spending over many decades. Think tanks accordingly have a great incentive to push for a confrontational posture towards Russia as they operate in an industry where conflicts are profitable and peace produces losses A mutually acceptable post-Cold War settlement threatened the revenue of one of the largest and most influential industries in the US, which was reversed as a result of NATO expansion and renewed tensions with Russia.

This book explores how the think tanks function, and how their growing role has influenced US policies toward Russia.

Has the 'Western' way of war been as successful as the rhetoric would have us believe? Is it fit for future conflicts, against future adversaries, adaptable enough for the information and data age? How should it adapt? Over 75 episodes of the world-renowned podcast challenged leaders from the military, politics and industry - as well as world leading scholars - with the question: What does the Western Way of War mean to you?

The answers were as surprising as they were illuminating. If there was broad recognition that the West had been losing military engagements at a frightening rate, there was not a common cause identified by discussants. With his inimitable style of interview, Professor Peter Roberts draws out the key aspects of the Western Way of War from hugely diverse and expert witnesses, seeking answers to the key questions for failure and advice on necessary adaptation to reverse the record of Western military performance since the end of the Cold War. The podcast became required listening at staff colleges around the world; the book enables a new generation of military students in the profession of arms to test their own thinking against the challenges laid clear by host and guests alike.